Practice Set 5 • Test 3 – Reading & Writing

Ryebrook Farmers’ Market is held in the main square of Ashwell, a small town surrounded by farms. It began nine years ago with only six stalls in the corner of a car park. Today more than forty local producers take part, and the market has long since moved into the square itself.

The market takes place on the second and fourth Saturday of each month, from eight in the morning until one o’clock. It goes ahead in all weathers, rain or shine. The only addition to the timetable is an extra evening market held on the Friday before Christmas.

Every stallholder has to grow, catch or make their goods within thirty miles of Ashwell. This is the market’s one strict rule, and it is never broken. Shoppers can therefore be sure that the vegetables, cheese, bread and honey on the tables all come from the countryside around them.

Nobody needs a ticket to walk round the market, as entry is completely free. Parking in the town car park costs £2 for the whole morning, but anyone who spends more than £10 at the stalls can claim that £2 back at the information desk before they leave.

There is no cash machine in the square. Most stalls are now able to take cards, although a handful of the smaller producers still accept coins and notes only. A van at the far end of the square sells hot drinks and breakfast rolls, and there are tables and chairs beside it for anyone who wants to sit down.

Dogs are welcome as long as they stay on a lead. Once a month a local band plays for an hour beside the fountain, and during the school holidays there is a free cookery workshop for children. Places on the workshop are limited, so they must be reserved online before the day.

When people hear that I am a marine biologist, they picture me swimming beside whales or diving with sharks. The truth is far less exciting. I spend most of my working life kneeling on the seabed in three metres of water, counting plants. I am writing this because seagrass is the least famous habitat in the sea and, I would argue, one of the most useful – yet hardly anybody knows that it is down there at all.

Seagrass is not seaweed. It is a true flowering plant that happens to live under the sea, and the underwater meadows it forms do an enormous amount of work. They give young fish somewhere safe to hide, they hold the sand in place when storms arrive, and they lock away carbon faster than a forest of the same size. Yet along this coast more than a third of the meadows have vanished in forty years, mostly because of dirty water running off the land and because of boat anchors dragged across the seabed.

My own project sounds slow, and it is. We grow new plants from seed in tanks at the university, then divers take them down and put them into the sand by hand, one small bag at a time. Last summer my team managed to cover an area no bigger than a football pitch. Some scientists tell me that work like this will never make a real difference, and I can understand why they say it. All the same, I do not accept it. Every meadow that survives is somewhere fish can breed, and I would far rather plant something than write another report about what we have lost.

People often ask me what an ordinary person can do, and they expect me to answer, “Train as a scientist.” You really do not need to. Ask your sailing club about moorings that do not drag along the bottom. Take your rubbish home from the beach. Tell one other person what seagrass actually does. Thousands of small choices made along a coastline add up far more quickly than one biologist with a bag of seeds ever will.